❶ This sentence could be written without 我 (wo3) here, much like the English construction “This virus cannot be ignored,” where the subject of the sentence is only implied, but it was harder for me to understand written that way, so for now, I’ve done it this way.

❷ The 都 (dou1) is frequently and normally added for emphasis when speaking so inclusively, such as “everyone,” “the whole…,” and “always.”

❸ The word for “sneeze” is very descriptive, and kind of fun, in Chinese. Made of three characters, the first one, 打 (da3) means “to strike, beat, or smash,” which is how one feels when sneezing. The second character, 噴 (pen1) literally means “spurt, spray,” which, again, is pretty much unavoidable during a sneeze unless you want to give yourself a hernia. The last character rounds it all up by clarifying that it IS indeed a sneeze, since 嚏(ti4) is directly translated “sneeze.”

❹ The first character here 細 (xi4) is the same one used to describe specifically which kind of noodles are desired in your stir fry, since it literally means “small, thin.” The second character 菌 (jun4) can mean “fungi, mushrooms, or bacteria.” Since bacteria were initially observed as long, thin strands, 細菌 (xi4 jun4) became the Chinese word for them.

❺ Whereas in English, there tends to be a specific word for “meat being eaten from a specific animal”(i.e. beef, mutton, pork) that is distinct from what the animal is called (steer/cow, sheep, pig), in Chinese that designation is made by adding the word for meat 肉 (rou4) to the actual animal name.

❻ If there is more than one adjective preceding a noun, the adjective marker 的 (de.) goes at the end of them all. This is most confusing to me when a pronoun is one of the adjectives, because I tend to think of them in their English grammar form (my, his, her’s, their’s) and add the 的 (de.) too soon to translate them in my mind.

❼ While in English, we tend to abbreviate references to the language by simply referring to the name of the country, in Chinese it is necessary to add characters/word parts to make it clear exactly “what” is Chinese. Food or language or culture, etc. Thus, here it is specifically stated as the Chinese language, 中文 (zhong1 wen2).

❽ Ironically, I find the Chinese word for “interesting” very interesting! It is made up of two characters 有趣 (you3 qu4), the first of which 有 (you3) is the very common word meaning “to have.” The second character 趣 (qu4) means “interest, fun, interesting, funny.” To my mind, to say something “has or holds interest” is a more complete way of saying it.

❾ I had kind of a funny problem trying to figure out how to say this quote from the Bible, because I memorized it YEARS ago as a young child from the King James version of the Bible as “a merry heart does good like a medicine.” This meant that I was trying to translate old English into Chinese and it was coming out all convoluted. Happily, my tutor helped me simplify it!